Page 51 of Can You See Her?

37

Rachel

The woman who takes me to the loo and stands outside the lockless cubicle has come in with a tray. There are two cups of tea and some Nice biscuits. The sugar granules glitter as they pass through a shaft of sunlight. They brought me some orange squash yesterday. It’s amazing how nice squash tastes when someone else makes it and when you’ve not had it since you were about ten. It’s all oddly civilised.Here’s some light refreshments while you give us all we need to lock you away for a very long time. There’s something a bitTitanicabout it, the string quartet playing on the deck while the ship sinks. If it was a string quartet. Might have been a full orchestra. I forget, forget if I ever even knew.

‘You refer to Lisa in the past tense,’ Blue Eyes says, readjusting her bottom on the chair and pulling her long black wrap skirt over her crossed leg. Her shoes today are soft black leather ankle boots with studs going up one side and a wedge heel. ‘You’re no longer friends?’

‘I’ve not told her we’re not. But we’re not.’

‘Why not?’

Why not indeed. Because minutes after I’d spoken to her on the phone, she drove past me. I was on the corner of our road and it was definitely her. She has a silver-grey Ford Focus and the passenger side had been keyed a year or two before and still had the scratch. She was driving quite fast, it seemed to me, and if she saw me, she didn’t let on. I only noticed her at the last moment, but her face was stern, her shoulders high, the whole position of her body at the wheel tense. She can’t have been on her way from anywhere other than my house. We live on a cul-de-sac; the only people she knows on our road are us. To come out any other way she’d have to fly.

A hard pain, like a punch, landed in my gut. My face was burning. She’d said on the phone that she’d seen Mark on Church Street. She hadn’t mentioned that she was at my house, but here she was in our road. I’d sensed that she hadn’t been telling me the truth but I had no idea why not. I knew for certain then that she hadn’t seen Mark on Church Street at all. She hadn’t seen him in passing. You don’t see someone in passing in their own home.

I hadn’t got as far as why she might have been at my house while I wasn’t there, why she hadn’t said that was where she’d been. Across the road, Ingrid’s blinds were closed on the upper floor. Her car was parked nearby on the close. Mark’s car was on our driveway. Funny, both their cars here in the afternoon. My stomach churned. I felt like you do when you’ve eaten a dodgy meal but you’re still trying to figure out whether it’s just indigestion or full-blown food poisoning.

I opened the front door as quietly as I could and hung up my jacket. I didn’t want any questions from Mark. I didn’t want any questions from anyone. I didn’t want anyone to ask me if I was OK or if I was sure I was OK, because I no longer knew what that meant.

I didn’t want to ask Mark if he was OK, or ask him what he’d been up to and hear the lie.

I’d been wondering how I was going to get through the next thirty-six hours, and now I wasn’t sure I could get through the next few minutes.

The clock in the kitchen said just after six. It was hours later than I’d thought. That was why Mark’s car was there. And Ingrid’s, although hers was usually there anyway due to her travelling in with Mark. Mark was home from work. As he would be, would’ve been since half past five or so. I couldn’t fathom how I could have lost so much time, having left my dad at four, but then I remembered that I’d gone up to the town hall pond and sat quietly, tried to gather up the frayed strands of myself and somehow knit them back together. I had no memory of actually sitting there, only a vague sensation of the cold of the bench against my backside. I didn’t remember leaving.

The kitchen smelled of cigarettes. Not stale, as such. Recently smoked.

The back door clattered against the frame.

‘Mark?’ I called out and headed to the lip of the back door.

He was standing on the lawn, his back to me. His hands were on his hips and he was looking down at the grass as if he’d spotted a pound coin and was building up to picking it up. He was so still, like cats are still, or pigeons, and you watch them wondering if they’re a very realistic ornament until they twitch and, with a little shock, you realise they’re alive after all.

I turned away. On the table were two cigarette butts on a saucer. I’d thought it was Ingrid here smoking when my back was turned, possibly making a play for my husband. I think I admitted that to myself fully only then. Wasn’t that why I’d kept those cigarette butts and hidden them in the garage? To not face it or to put off facing it until I felt strong enough, lucid enough? Saying something out loud had felt too much like opening a gate to a field of stampeding cattle.

But now I knew even less. It wasn’t Ingrid who had told me she was in the supermarket. It wasn’t Ingrid who had just driven past me on her way out of our road. And it wasn’t Ingrid who was sharing illicit cigarettes with my husband.

It was Lisa. Lisa, who liked the odd puff, more so since Patrick had left, more again since the girls went to uni. I’d even thought that Mark had taken up having the odd crafty fag at the pub, but actually, come to think of it, Roy didn’t smoke. So where had Mark been? Mark the saint. Mark the good man. Unremarkable when he was younger, of no interest to the girls who lusted after the likes of Nick whatsisname with the eyeliner or any of the other boys who passed for heart-throbs back in the day. Mark never went in for fashion, preening, posing or pretension of any kind. He never saw the point in being anything other than himself. And this ordinary bloke had, without my realising it, suddenly come into his own now that certain women were ready to move on from the slick big spenders who had impressed them in their twenties, ready for someone who might not know how to be flash with the cash and the compliments but knew how to be truly kind.

I saw it. I saw it clearly in a way I hadn’t before. Ingrid’s husband had shot it all up his nose and left her penniless. Lisa’s had smooth-talked her into bed, into marriage, into kids, only to leave her when he fancied falling in love all over again with the one thing she couldn’t be: a woman he didn’t yet know, whose faults were yet to be revealed. I saw how my unremarkable husband might appeal in a way he always had to me. I had never wanted the flash treatment. I had never wanted moonlight and roses. I had only ever wanted to be seen for who I was, not just for my looks. These days I wanted to be seen despite them.

But these are all thoughts that have come to me since. Then – and I think, though I’m not sure, it was only last week – in those last moments of trust, I didn’t have an idea as formulated or as clichéd as him cheating on me with my best friend, not in a million years. The thought that came to me was: he hasn’t even fetched the ashtray.

I stepped out onto the greening paving stones that pass for a patio. ‘Mark?’

He turned around, his eyes creasing at the edges. ‘Where’ve you been? It’s gone six.’

‘I’ve been to see my dad. I told you this morning I was going today.’

His eyebrows went almost high enough to be interest before pushing together into a frown, as if it all made sense now. ‘Are we getting a Chinese?’

‘It’s Friday. So no.’

He looked towards next door’s back garden before looking back to me – as far as my chin, anyway. Ingrid. She was why he’d been in the garden. A lift home hadn’t been enough – he’d needed another chat in the garden. Or she had.

‘Have you been smoking?’ I said.

He spread his hands and made a funny rectangle with his mouth, the same one he did when Liverpool missed a goal opportunity. A look that saidyes, you caught me, but don’t say anything.

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